Ethical AI art generation? Adobe Firefly may be the answer
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I don't think there's much value in distilling what passes for discourse on Twitter these days into an automated process.
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Eh, if the art someone can produce can be simply replaced by a robot then I’m not sure they were much of an artist to begin with.
The good artists will still get paid and if they’re smart they will use AI for inspiration or to do more tedious or labor intensive parts of their job. AI might put the mediocre ones out of a job though.
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I can consider AI generated art to be art without acknowledging Net Force: Darknet Patriot War as literature, right?
Shh, you're not supposed to say the quiet part out loud.
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Not at all. I respond to the work of an artist. Mass-produced hotel pictures rarely provoke such a reaction.
It is the difference between having the work of an experienced cabinetmaker and an IKEA piece. Both serve a purpose. Both types of furniture are prominent in my home, as are original paintings, lithographs, and framed 100-year-old original fruit crate labels, along with hand-crafted ceramics, cheap modern bowls and glasses from Costco, and forty year-old Fiestaware.
I am happy to react to a piece enabled by well-considered machine-learning. The "artist" in such cases is the machine, I am sorry to say, absent an indication of not only prompts, but editing, re-working, and touch-up by the purported artist.
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I heart pithy, and you captured my POV on this better than I was able to do, in far fewer words. Thanks.
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If I study all of Picasso's work, and can now make a new painting clearly in the same style (but not any subject he's painted before), am I legally infringing his rights if he is alive today?
I would've thought such questions are long settled and there is a clear-cut answer already. (But I don't know the answer -- yes or no?)
"new invention destroys some people's livelihood" -- that happens all the time in all different fields, people/society has to adapt (provide training for new job roles etc.) but IMHO that is not a consideration for why such new invention should be disallowed
I would've thought such questions are long settled and there is a clear-cut answer already. (But I don't know the answer -- yes or no?)
"new invention destroys some people's livelihood" -- that happens all the time in all different fields, people/society has to adapt (provide training for new job roles etc.) but IMHO that is not a consideration for why such new invention should be disallowed
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Will artists stop complaining now?
My guess is no, because they never cared about copyright - they just used it as a blunt object.
My guess is no, because they never cared about copyright - they just used it as a blunt object.
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If you can control the machine, AI or edit program etc., so dexterously that it produces the aesthetic effect you desire, then perhaps it is functioning analogously to a paintbrush or chisel, and you are in act as an artist.
But the process still seems very remotely mediated, and cuts you off from coming fully into act as an aesthetic creator. Staying as close as possible to the senses and intellect in all phases seems better.
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Off the top of my head: you could train it to automatically generate political messages optimized for specific populations.
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Reading that agreement:
The bolded part is likely what Adobe is using as justification. In as much as AI generated art could be considered infringing, it'd be considered modified from and/or derivative of the original work, and the license allows end users to do just that.
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100%. Really it's a pretty basic problem to solve, so much layout is based on very established grid principles, and unless you're reading old issues of Raygun or something not particularly innovative overall. Certainly at the very least there's a lot of boring drudge work before you get to the more creative choices.
This train is leaving the station, one way or another.
I'm a Creative Cloud subscriber, and I don't have massive love for Adobe or their subscription system. And yet, I like using the tools for the most part, and as a professional the (tax write off) value I get out of them is more than worth it. Replacing Photoshop would be a huge lift for me, I'm very fast in it and it's extremely powerful.
I signed up for the Firefly beta, figured I might as well see what's coming.
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Dear future AI video generator, please write me a sci-fi script borrowing some of the aspects of the plots and characters of Star Wars and The Expanse and The Martian, then render me a 4K video file that we can watch at dinner tomorrow evening. Here's my three dollars
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After a time, the originals might not even exist, except inside large neural networks.
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If this finally fixed MS Word picture placement deciding to yeet my images to entirely different pages from a 0.1" positional shift, I, for one, would welcome our new AI overlords.
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Suppose these AI systems become 90-95% as good as a human artist. That will put pretty much all artists out of a job. No one going into art would be able to support themselves. Art would die and new forms of art would be unlikely to get made or explored. Not only that, but the new art being made would be inferior to what came before. We'd stagnate artistically as a culture.
I think that's a lot more serious of a concern than some random labor or technical job getting automated. The solution doesn't even need to be banning AI art, but just doing nothing and letting it kill an industry of human creative expression would not be good either.
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Why would the existence of AI art stop artists from creating art if the existence of current artists doesn't stop new artists from creating art?
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One consequence, looking at it from a very high level, is that this technology seems to empower a huge number of people that used to be either not quite talented or not passionate enough, to instantly SURPASS a bunch of other people who ARE all that, and spent decades investing in it. Millions of people who's entire identity was put into this must feel like having the rug pulled out from under them, and for what? In return we get tens of millions of moderately talented hobbyists (at least as long as ChatGPT hasn't taken over prompting completely)flood the world with mediocrity. What is the aggregate effect on Total Human Wellbeing, here?
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Existing artists do stop some aspiring artists from creating art.
Do I need to explain how a market economy works?
Edit: though note in the former case with humans competing against humans, at least aspiring artists that fail to break into the market feel like they can try and there's a chance.
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Oh. My. God. Ray Gun! I bought the first few issues of that mag, and yeah, the layout and design was really... Interesting. It also had a lot of good and interesting articles covering alternative/indie bands, with no thought to commercialism.
Unfortunately, the layout and design meant that most articles were hard to read, and in many cases, sections were literally unreadable.
The most hipster magazine to ever hipster, before hipsters were a thing.
(Also, I find the big creative process with magazine design/layout is deciding on the basic design/layout choices; the "look" of the magazine. After that, making it is largely automatic)
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This definitely isn't as ethical as Adobe is selling it. Adobe Stock has a lot of images that are being illicitly sold — I've seen several instances myself, which I've confirmed with the original artists. Without a doubt, the dataset this is trained on is tainted.
Of course, Adobe could always crack down on this but I don't see that happening.
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As for the wider topic of ethics in AI content generation, the problem with the argument is that what AI is doing is no different than what human artists do when learning is that when humans copy existing work near-verbatim and try to pass it off as their own, it's looked down upon because it's plagiarism. It's totally fine to study an artstyle from existing pieces and create original works using that style, but that's not always what AI is doing… there are numerous examples of training data popping out nearly unmodified.
So to me, the most important thing for making AI generation more ethical is to guarantee that copies or near-copies can't emerge, even if the wielder tries to coax them out. Basically, hold the machine to the same standard that one might hold a human.
Of course, Adobe could always crack down on this but I don't see that happening.
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As for the wider topic of ethics in AI content generation, the problem with the argument is that what AI is doing is no different than what human artists do when learning is that when humans copy existing work near-verbatim and try to pass it off as their own, it's looked down upon because it's plagiarism. It's totally fine to study an artstyle from existing pieces and create original works using that style, but that's not always what AI is doing… there are numerous examples of training data popping out nearly unmodified.
So to me, the most important thing for making AI generation more ethical is to guarantee that copies or near-copies can't emerge, even if the wielder tries to coax them out. Basically, hold the machine to the same standard that one might hold a human.
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Yes, you need to explain to me why artists are motivated to create art, because it seems we are starting from very different axioms.
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You understand that people perform all sorts of activities without being compensated, right?
Give me your best guess as to what percentage of all human-created art has been monetized.
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Much if not most art is not someone making the Mona Lisa out of love for the craft - it is someone doing labor for a living, and taking the results of your labor without explicit permission and using it to make a machine to replace you is generally frowned upon.
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I should also address this particular assumption. No, there is nothing definitive about human society that demands we force people to work and 'make money' to eat and have shelter. In an automated, AI-driven society where production is largely non-human, we better have an answer to what to do with more people than jobs.
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Much if not most? FFS, only 10% of art school graduates go on to make a living doing art. The internet is awash with people cranking out art because they want to. I soundly reject your claim that MOST art is monetized without any evidence to back that because it seems ludicrously wrong.
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You understand that even if someone isn't compensated, they might practice their craft in hopes that they'll get to that point, right? You understand that those that are compensated (and there are many), would produce a lot less art if suddenly it only cost them money to make are and they never got any compensation, right? And without any compensation, many people that make are now never would make any and others never would have focused their studies on it. Sure, some human art would remain, but AI art runs a huge danger of stifling the entire human art endeavor here. That's serious. I don't know why you pretend otherwise with such flimsy arguments. Or are you one of those people that think artists don't deserve compensation for their creative efforts?
Like I said, there are several possible solutions, but ignoring the problem like you are isn't one of them.
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If the past 50 years where outrageous increases in productivity have enriched only those sitting at the top are any example, I'm not optimistic that this will be the case. It seems more likely that displaced individuals will simply be left out in the cold. This is the crux of the issue for those who are worried.
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Sure, but we don't have that answer yet, and until we do this is just naively ignoring the reality that companies can and will use these technologies to cut costs and jobs without any regard for what happens to the people they are replacing. You can't possibly believe Adobe is interested in pushing for some sort of post-capitalist society.
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That's one potential answer, but it's far from guaranteed. In the interim, pretending the problem doesn't exist and that people don't need to make money to eat, have shelter, etc, is ridiculous.
But I see now you at least acknowledge the problem exists in some form even while your other comments were acting like it doesn't exist at all.
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Naturally artists deserve the compensation mutually agreed upon between them and whoever is consuming their art. But one thing I know for sure is that humans, as a group, will never stop creating art regardless of the market conditions. Saying that fewer people will create art is both true and irrelevant. I'm sure history is filled with possible-Picassos who never painted because of exigent reasons, but we still had van Gogh even though he died broke.
However, since you think it's "serious" then explain the actual serious ramifications if human generated art loses the ability to reliably generate income. What happens to us?
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Is it really that hard to recognize that the difference in SCALE is not something that should be dismissed casually?
I like the observant analogy that another poster in here made a while ago: "a" search warrant or "a" random sample car-search s not a bad thing, but upscaling that to mass-surveillance ends up being a lot more than " just" a quantitative difference. The whole nature of the question changes with the scale.
Same goes for machine-powered "imitation"', no longer limited by ordinary human constraints.
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This problem exists for a much larger set of people than just artists, so it seems to me finding a general solution makes a lot more sense than just trying to insulate artists from the impact of AI/automation.
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That's a good point. Between an excellent artist with human limits and an unlimited mediocrity generator, a lot of businesses would choose the latter.
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I'm starting to get confused as to what the argument here is...that we no longer will get 'Picassos' because Budweiser won't hire him to do the art for their new beer can?
From a cultural perspective, do we care about who generates the art for businesses? Is that where we are deriving our cultural value from? The next commercial jingle?
If human art is 'excellent' and AI art is 'mediocre', then human art will stand (and sell) on its own.
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Just because one has the moral right to do something with one's own brain and body doesn't imply that one has the right to do the same thing with any and every tool. One may have the right to walk or use a wheelchair on the sidewalk, but not to ride a motorcycle down the sidewalk at 60 mph. The ethics of training-set sourcing requires at least as much nuance as the ethics of how one traverses the sidewalk.
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Agreed. The vast majority of art is made for art's sake. This is the case on Twitter, Instagram, Deviantart, Pixiv, or any of the large image sharing websites, where the vast majority of contributors create art that is not monetized.
The same is true for photography, fiction writing, 3d makefiles, music (just see how many people are actively making money through music vs the number of kids who go to piano lessons), knitting, sculpting, woodworking, crafts etc. Creative outlets will always have people engaging in them for rewards (personal, social) other than just the economic.
Humans are a creative species. Monetization of our creative skills is a fairly new phenomenon, and AI tools are just a new addenddum both in addition to and parallel to our creative endeavours as a species and as individuals.
We did not stop writing fiction when AI writing tools came out, we did not stop composing music when algorithmically created music came about, and we will not stop making art because AI art generation tools exist.
That is not to say that there are no ethical or economic concerns with regards to AI art. But the argument that 'people would stop making art if a computer can do it for you' is very much a strawman argument in this debate, and holds very little water.
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